Association between individual differences in self-reported emotional resilience and the affective perception of neutral faces.
BACKGROUND
Resilience, i.e., the ability to cope with stress and adversity, relies heavily on judging adaptively complex situations. Judging facial emotions is a complex process of daily living that is important for evaluating the affective context of uncertain situations, which could be related to the individual's level of resilience. We used a novel experimental paradigm to test the hypothesis that highly resilient individuals show a judgment bias towards positive emotions.


METHODS
65 non-treatment seeking subjects completed a forced emotional choice task when presented with neutral faces and faces morphed to display a range of emotional intensities across sadness, fear, and happiness.


RESULTS
Overall, neutral faces were judged more often to be sad or fearful than happy. Furthermore, high compared to low resilient individuals showed a bias towards happiness, particularly when judging neutral faces.


CONCLUSIONS
This is a cross-sectional study with a non-clinical sample.


CONCLUSIONS
These results support the hypothesis that resilient individuals show a bias towards positive emotions when faced with uncertain emotional expressions. This capacity may contribute to their ability to better cope with certain types of difficult situations, especially those that are interpersonal in nature.
Arce
Estibaliz
E
Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037-0985, United States. esarce@ucsd.edu
Simmons
Alan N
AN
Stein
Murray B
MB
Winkielman
Piotr
P
Hitchcock
Carla
C
Paulus
Martin P
MP
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010555:Personality Inventory; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D055500:Resilience, Psychological; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult